sandbox AUGUST 2021 / ISSUE 278AUGUST 2021 / ISSUE 278

| Music marketing for the digital era

INFLUENCERINFLUENCERMARKETINGMARKETING

the sandbox guide to

Modern influencer Modern influencer marketing offers marketing offers huge rewards: huge rewards: global virality, global virality, authenticity, and authenticity, and affordability. We affordability. We speak to the experts speak to the experts to find out how to to find out how to make it work for make it work for your musicyour music

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THIS ISSUE

The Sandbox Guide to… influencer marketing. Influencer marketing in 2021 is more strategic and reliable than ever, with the pandemic only making it extra-popular. It’s also essential to get the some very nuanced parts right: so here’s how to avoid the pitfalls and attain the windfalls when working with influencers and music.

Capitol is partnering with Song House Live for a songwriting-bootcamp twist on the “hype house” trend; and electronic music label Monstercat is turning its own feline logo into a 3D animated “influencer”.

Sandbox’s popular Tools and Behind the Campaign pieces continue to be published every two weeks on the Music Ally website.

From now on you’ll find Tools here and Behind the Campaign here. For past issues of Sandbox, including previous Tools and Behind the Campaigns, please search our Archive.

The Lead Campaigns

Tools & Behind The Campaign

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The influencer marketing issue...

Using influencers to market an artist or song is not a new idea (in fact, if you count the likes of radio DJs, it’s a very old one) but recently, the strategic use of influencers has changed – and in some very interesting ways. It’s wildly popular, too: in the US, 67.9% of marketers overall will use it in 2021. So how can you use these potentially kingmaking social superstars in a powerful, tasteful, authentic way? We break down the influencer space, and look at some notable case studies.

In this Guide:

• Why influencer marketing is more nuanced, useful and reliable than it used to be – and how it’s a more organised (and often bigger) part of a structured campaign.

• How the pandemic has contributed to the recent rise in influencer marketing – and how in 2021 the industry has thrown its weight behind it to launch careers.

• Case studies: the Universal Music Mansion generated over 20m views on TikTok and created nearly 100 TikTok videos using the Universal Music repertoire; and US rapper

Joseph Black shows how TikTok is much more than just dancing, partnering with influencers in TikTok’s POV (point-of-view) community.

• Practical advice from influencer experts, including Songfluencer CEO Johnny Cloherty, Warner Records associate director of influencer marketing Jen Darmafall, Luisa-Christie Walton-Stoev, founder of Loud Cat Social, and more.

• Alternatives: aren’t musicians the original influencers? Artists can monetise niche spaces and audiences – and become their own, ideal, “influencer”.

• Looking to the future: possible regulation of the space is coming, and we may be facing a future where everyone is a “macro-influencer.”

And in Campaigns, we take a look at two novel ways that two labels are stretching the concept of influencer marketing: Capitol’s songwriting-camp hype-house and Monstercat’s virtual cross-platform influencer.

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The Sandbox Guide to...

THE ‘INFLUENCER MARKETING’ ISSUE

Modern influencer marketing offers huge rewards: global virality, authenticity, and

affordability. We speak to the experts to find out how to make it work for your music.

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INFLUENCER MARKETING

Influencer marketing overview: a matured option that offers value

nfluencer marketing may no longer shine with the glow of the new and the virtuous

in 2021, with a rash of embarrassing influencer fails and stories of fake followers taking the sheen off an industry that was once seen as marketing’s brightest new star. But what influencer marketing has lost in terms of novelty, it has more than made up for in terms of becoming an established business. Business Insider reports that 67.9% of US marketers

from companies with 100 or more employees will use influencer marketing in 2021, up from 62.3% last year. In 2022, Business Insider adds, that figure will rise to 72.5%. The music industry is showing a similar appetite, with a wealth of new companies springing up to offer influencer marketing advice to record labels – while most larger labels have themselves recruited experts in the field. This has thrown up all kinds of fascinating marketing moves. Some are obvious: dance influencers (or dancefluencers, if you will), have become hugely important in TikTok marketing campaigns; and others are a bit more

involved – Universal Sweden launched its Music Mansion in Stockholm last year, creating what the label said was the Nordic region’s first TikTok house. The global pandemic has also contributed to the recent rise in influencer marketing, with budgetary constraints and studio closures making the relatively simple charms of influencer marketing a win / win in a fragmented media industry. “I think labels get it [influencer marketing] more now because of the pandemic,” says Luisa-Christie Walton-Stoev, founder of influencer marketing agency Loud Cat Social and former

Short video now rules: in influencer marketing, the music industry is overwhelmingly focused on TikTok. But TikTok may not always work for you: find the influencers on a platform with an approach that fits your artist.

Don’t be distracted by dance: there’s more to TikTok influencers than dance challenges. Discover which of TikTok’s many sizable creative communities aligns with your artist – and propose interesting creative concepts to influencers in this space.

Short video, tight focus: understand the restraints of 15-second video and zoom into your song – find the one lyric, one emotion, or one hook.

Think quality and quantity: It’s important to use a number of influencers for your campaign - to build not only the buzz and the scene itself, but to expedite what TikTok is good at: the creative evolution of video content.

Be bold and up-front: a limited budget can reap large rewards (or can be acceptably inexpensive failures). Influencer investments at the start of a wider campaign can easily be earned back if a song turns into a stream-ing hit.

The old rules still apply: hopping on a hot trend like TikTok influencer marketing may offer fast, cheap rewards – or it could be an expensive damp squib, without structure, focus, and a marketing strategy around it.

And yet… not all rules do: building long-term relationships with influenc-ers may not result in long-term repeat successes – influencers can fall out of fashion fast, so prepare to be ruthless.

For those with large budgets, hype houses are currently a way to hot-house content, buzz and brand tie-ins; artists on tighter budgets could figure out how to get their music used by these creators, who are given lots of creative freedom.

A long term, living campaign: Decide what your meaningful marketing outcome is – it might not be a simple KPI. A song’s meaning can evolve, stretch and grow over time with repeated influencer use.

Actionable takeaways

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Case Study

ne of the most intriguing de-velopments in influencer mar-keting over the past few years

has been the rise of the content house (also known as the creator house, the influencer house and the hype house), essentially a house where influencers go to live, work (and… create videos) together, often with a sponsor behind it. Universal Music Sweden was one of the first labels to explore this concept: in 2019 it created the NJIE House, which housed six Swedish YouTubers for 30 days with the support of Swedish food and drinks brand NJIE.

The house, in central Stockholm with large windows, was intended to allow the YouTubers to interact with the public in real life and to create content for their own YouTube channels, the dedicat-ed NJIE House YouTube channel and NJIE’s website. In total, the NJIE House YouTube channel has attracted 2.15k subscribers and 500k views for its four

videos since launching in January 2019, which suggests a moderate success. Universal Sweden returned to this idea in August 2020, creating the Universal Music Mansion in Stockholm, which housed seven of Sweden’s leading TikTok influencers for two weeks, with the support of Swedish fashion brand NA-KD. Lina Kellgren, then PR and activation manager at Universal Music Sweden, said at the time that the collaboration made sense, given the importance of music for TikTok and vice versa. “Everything you do in the app is based on sound, so it is a matter of course that we as a music company are not only involved in the platform but also contribute,” she told Resumé. Kellgren told Music Ally at the time that the project generated more than 19m views using the #universalmusicman-sion hashtag on TikTok (it is now up to 21.4m) and more than 90 TikTok videos, all of which used Universal Music

repertoire. It also stoked considerable coverage in more mainstream media: Kellgren said the the campaign generat-ed “7-million reach in media exposure, including the Swedish ‘Financial Times’, national television and the biggest eve-ning newspaper.” Most marketers see the combination of “labels + influencer house” as an inter-esting idea in theory, if one that might be rather more difficult (and expensive) to put into practice, particularly if you are going to be competing with the likes of Netflix (which is going to air a show around LA’s The Hype House) for attention. The results of the NJIE House and the Music Mansion, meanwhile, suggest limited success, rather than the kind of runaway reward that begs to be immediately repeated. “I think labels doing their own sort of music-focused hype houses would be an interesting approach,” says one label marketer, talking about the idea in general rather than Universal Sweden’s experiments in particular. “There are so many ‘creator houses’ that currently ex-ist, that we’ve just focused on connect-ing each of them with our artists and building relationships.”

Universal Music Mansion

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influencer marketing lead at Atlantic Records. “They’ve realised the power of social media over a five-grand billboard in a shopping centre.” Influencer marketing today: TikTok is breaking careers; but is the industry simply chasing the hot new thing (again?)The basic art of influencer marketing - persuading famous and / or well-regarded people to showcase your products - is certainly nothing new. But this trend accelerated with the rise of social media, which gave celebrities their own platform to reach the public, and in particular with Instagram, whose idyllic, photo-based platform was well suited to showing off products at their best. More recently, influencer marketing has pivoted towards the rising stars of social media in TikTok, Instagram Reels, Twitch and Clubhouse. According to a recent report from influencer marketing platform Linqia, interest in using TikTok in influencer marketing campaigns rose 325% in one year, with 68% of marketers surveyed saying they want to use the platform in 2021. This preponderance for TikTok influencers is especially prevalent among music industry marketers, with the platform already enjoying its reputation as a place to make hits. Johnny Cloherty, CEO of US marketing company Songfluencer, lays bare how dominant TikTok is in music industry influencer marketing. “About a month and a half ago I surveyed 30 different people, different cross sections of different labels and one of the questions was: ‘What platforms are you currently purchasing influencer marketing on?’ Everyone answered TikTok and very few people answered other platforms,” he

INFLUENCER MARKETING

says. “Two people mentioned Instagram; one person mentioned Snapchat, two or three people mentioned YouTube. Everyone said yes to TikTok.” Warner Records associate director of influencer marketing Jen Darmafall sees this kind of evolution as inevitable. “Influencer marketing in 2021 has become one of the most important strategies involved in a label’s marketing roll-out,” Darmafall says. “This has evolved as we have seen social platforms such as TikTok continue to successfully help break artists’ careers.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen various platforms shift from being the ‘leader’, this has also impacted who the ‘top influencer’ is, as well as the type of content / the length of content fans gravitate towards to. As these have all

evolved, so has our marketing spends.” TikTok isn’t the only platform for music industry influencers, of course. Josh Deal, the CEO of Zebr, says that Instagram Reels have potential for music marketing, while in the wider world of influencers, Linqia claims that the number of marketers planning to use Twitch has more than doubled. Clubhouse is testing its own “Creator Pilot Program” to highlight the modish app’s new wave of influencers and help them connect with brands, and influencers are also being encouraged to get onto Discord, as the industry frantically chases the hottest new thing. At the same time, advertising authorities and platforms alike have been taking a harder line on influencer marketing, wary of a practice that sometimes seems to run to its own particular logic. In the UK, influencers have to adhere to ASA rules on sponsored content, while in the US the FTC has issued rules on disclosure for influencers. Facebook and Instagram require influencers to use tags to distinguish branded content and YouTube ad policies mean that influencers have to disclose to viewers that their content is sponsored.

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Practical advice: getting results re-quires research, prag-matic understanding, picking careful targets – and authenticity

he first - and perhaps most fundamental - piece of advice for anyone looking to launch

an influencer marketing campaign is to do your research. “You’ve got to think like what your goal is,” says Cloherty. “So there may be an influencer that the brand of that influencer, the style or the affinity of that influencer, might mesh really well with your artist: you wear the same clothes, same brands, same things. But say you want to do a dance challenge. Well, what if that influencer doesn’t dance?” Walton-Stoev agrees. “If it’s a mu-sic campaign… I’ll look and see who follows the artists that we follow as a kind of starting point,” she says.

“For example, if it was inviting people to a Lizzo gig. Yeah, maybe a lot of people go, ‘Yeah I’ll come, that will be fun. I’d love to see Lizzo live... she seems like she seems cool... I know that one song...’ Versus somebody that actually follows her and knows the whole album and will go and will be singing along to the songs and will be really thankful to be there.” At the other side of the scale, a fairly obvious red flag would be an influenc-er that isn’t that interested in music, as Zebr’s Deal explains. “Do they enjoy music? I think that’s always a good observation to make first. And how consistently are they posting? That’s always a turnoff for me if they’re not posting that frequently, and they’re not really using music.”Walton-Stoev says she will even use

Twitter to directly seek out influenc-ers who are interested in the artist in question. “Twitter is actually very good for outreach stuff. Quite a few times I’ve gone on looking for people that love, [US rock band] All Time Low that are based in the UK, and have a presence on Twitch. That isn’t what I’ve done but something like that. And I’ve got a lot of people retweeting and I’ve got people replying or DMing me on Instagram, ‘Hey I saw your tweet.’” Deal - who believes in using a com-bination of data and instinct when looking for suitable influencers for a particular job - talks about the im-portance of context and lyrical hooks when choosing an influencer. “If the song’s about what makes you fall in love with someone, you would pick particular, maybe comedic, influenc-ers,” he says. “Whereas if the song is more about having fun and dancing, you’re probably going to pick a differ-ent type of influencer.” This, he explains, can go down to a specific lyrical level. “If there’s a narra-tive, then we start with a narrative and go: ‘OK what type of influencers could

do that?’” he says. “So then you’re looking for influencers that would be up for playing on that, who could come up with something funny? And you can trial it and AB test it a little bit with certain influencers and see what clicks the most.” In doing so, marketers should aim to strike a compromise between building a longer relationship with influenc-ers - which can be very fruitful - and keeping your marketing plans fresh, using the right person at the right moment rather than always relying on the same, reliable faces. “I think it’s important to build relation-ships with people that can help you,” says Cloherty. “But what we’ve real-ised over time is the same influencers that we were using a year ago, we’re not using anymore, because they’ve fallen off, they’re not relevant. En-gagement is terrible, whatever. So you have to tolerate the fact that some are going to fall off.” Similarly, Cloherty says that compa-nies should always hire a number of influencers for a particular job. “I see

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INFLUENCER MARKETING

Lizzo

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people talk or they write in blogs: ‘I hired one influ-encer and it didn’t work.’ Well, no shit. That’s not the point. That’s like saying, ‘Well, I got a blog to write about my song. And nothing hap-pened. So PR doesn’t work.’ It’s not about one; it’s about many things happening.” “Influencer marketing isn’t just ‘spend-ing’ on the biggest or the smallest cre-ator,” Darmafall adds. “Just hiring one influencer isn’t going to give you the results you’d like, no matter their size. You need to identify who the audience is so that you know you’re targeting the right influencers. You can pay the biggest creator in the world to use an artist’s song in their post, but if their audience doesn’t align with the audi-ence of the artist, the performance can be pretty underwhelming.” How to measure the impact of an influencer campaign is another tricky issue. Darmafall says that this will vary according to the campaign objective. “Was the goal to build artist / track awareness? Was the goal to drive UGC online? Was the goal to help drive con-sumption?” Darmafall asks.

“A few key metrics being tracked are views, likes, comments and shares across individual posts, as well as across the entire campaign. We look at artist follower growth throughout a campaign flight, fan sentiment across posts, UGC increase using artist sounds on platforms such as TikTok, as well as any lifts we see in streaming that may be being driven from buzz coming out of our influencer campaigns.”

For all that, Cloherty says that labels sometimes focus too heavily on imme-diate financial return when assessing influencer campaigns. “There are a lot of people who are measuring the ef-fectiveness of influencer marketing the same way they measure the effective-ness of a billboard,” he says. “They put a billboard up, it’s up there for 30 days and they say, ‘OK, so what happened?’ The difference when it comes to Tik-Tok is the content lives and breathes; it’s like a working piece of product that goes on for a long period of time, and can resurface at any time.” Another thing for marketers to avoid like the plague is their content looking too forced. “When you’re launching songs, people like to see that things are coming from the ground up, not the top down,” says Cloherty. “And I think that’s been true in music since day one.” “The biggest turn-off for a label when partnering with influencers is forced content,” says Darmafall.

“The biggest challenge labels face when trying to reach their target au-dience is authenticity. Forcing content hinders performance both across social engagement, as well as when it comes to connecting with your target audience. Building trust is important between influencers and their fans and forced content works against said trust. It’s important to make sure you partner with the right creators.”

Clearly, this is a tricky balance for marketers, who have to make adverts and paid promotion look like organic engagement,

while obeying all the many regulations around social advertising. So what should marketers avoid, if they want their paid promotions to look organic? Cloherty points to excessive hashtags as a particular villain. “A lot of times, labels want to include a bunch of hashtags like when you force influenc-ers to use ‘#challenge’ ‘#whatever’” he explains. “People are like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s definitely bought.’ Or when a bunch of big influencers are tagging the artist’s TikTok handle, that looks bought. When influencers are used and the content that they’re posting is not unique, or is not relevant to their brand. Obviously someone’s like, ‘Well, why did you do this, this is not your normal thing.’” Finally Josh Goldfeder, marketing manager at independent entertain-ment marketing agency The Syndicate, warns on cost. “Since TikTok has blown up so much during the pandemic, in-fluencer fees have risen exponentially,” he says.

Alternatives – cut out the middleman: musicians are influencers too

s an alternative to labels hiring influencers to promote their artists’ music, how

about artists earning money as influ-encers themselves? In many ways, it seems the perfect fit: while schlepping

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Jonny Cloherty, Jen Darmafall, Josh Goldfelder Jonny Cloherty, Jen Darmafall, Josh Goldfelder

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flat tummy tea on Instagram may not be the pinnacle of the rock and roll dream, musi-cians have become more and more interested in working for brands, as social media has risen to prominence; and fans have always been inter-ested in the products their idols are involved with. Ariana Grande, who has 248m followers on Instagram, has promoted Ulta Beauty on the platform, earning an estimated (by Influencer Marketing Hub and, as ever with predicted earning data, to be considered a ball-park figure) $391,530 -$652,550 per post. That’s right at the top end of things, of course – but any musician with a reasonable following on social platforms could make some money from brands.

Mxmtoon, a musician who rose to prominence via clips of her playing Ukulele on YouTube and Instagram, was recently named one of the top music influencers of 2021 by Neo-reach and is hardly a household name, while her 920k followers on Instagram is impressive rather than galactic. Some artists may – understandably – baulk at this, but Grande, for example, manages to balance out the potential bad karma of paid Instagram posts by using her Instagram account as a plat-form to support causes such as trans rights and mental health awareness.

At the same time, artists might be slightly keener to take the influencer buck when they consider how many influencers are launching music careers, from Jaden Hossler to Dixie D’Amelio.

There are, of course, practical con-siderations to this. Songfluencer’s Cloherty says that musicians shouldn’t follow the classic influencer mode of posting every single day in a relentless attempt to find followers. “That’s not

their business,” he says. “Their business is making music. But does that mean that they shouldn’t make a couple of bucks promoting someone else or doing brand deals? I don’t think so.” Mary Panico, marketing manager at The Syndicate, says that musicians need to have “not only an engaged audience for their music but for their personality / views / interests as well”. “And if that brand aligns well with that artist, and the artist can organically tie their prod-uct into their content they already post - then we’d con-sider that a perfect match,” she explains.

Zebr’s Josh Deal, meanwhile, says that musicians should

look to find their niche as influencers. “If you can build an audience and find your weirdness and express that and whatever that audience is, you can leverage that audience to your music,” he says. “You know, you love tattoos and Pokemon; and you end up doing brand deals that are related to you and your audience and your person-ality and your interest. I think that’s a brilliant thing to do.” Deal says that artists these days can monetise “more niche spaces”. “When you go back to all the major pop stars [in the past], there would only be so many brands, you would end up run-ning through.

“Whereas now, there’s a really nice middle space of smaller brands that you can monetise with and actually want to get in front of your audience because it’s topical for them,” he

INFLUENCER MARKETING

Ariana Grande

Dixie D’Amelio

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Case Study

hen most people tend to think of TikTok influencers, it is the dancers who come

to mind first, particularly in terms of breaking new music. But the case of US rapper Joseph Black and his song “(I Hope You) Miss Me” shows how TikTok is so much more than just dancing - and how marketers can use different sections of interest on TikTok to promote their acts. Black, a “self-made rapper, singer and producer” from Duluth Minnesota, ini-tially released “(I Hope You) Miss Me” independently on February 24, 2020. Songfluencer CEO Johnny Cloherty says that the song began averaging between 7k and 10k streams per day on Spotify, a respectable, if not stellar, total, before Songfluencer became involved in March 2020. Songfluencer arranged two initial phases of promotion using influencers from TikTok’s POV community (users who employ point-of-view camera angles in their video). “The song is hip hop / emo,” says Cloherty. “And we used influencers in the POV commu-nity because we thought it’s easier to show your emo side in a POV piece of content.” POV, Cloherty adds, has a unique way of capturing emotion. “It’s filmed from the chest up, it’s a hard focus on the person’s face, and it’s easier to show happiness or sadness or drama in that kind of footage,” he explains. “I think that’s why [the song] really works in that world: it’s how the camera

operates and how those creators like to be overdramatic. They like to mouth things in a dramatic way and it’s captured really well, when the audience views what was captured on camera. Whereas, you could put that to a dance. But does that really match the energy of the song sonically? Not necessarily.” In the first phase of the campaign, Songfluencer spent around $5,000, using ten influencers from the POV community. The company waited around a month and a half before initiating phase two, in which it spent another $5,000 on TikTok influencers in the POV community. [Cloherty says

that one of his business partners now manages Black]. “Capitol signed it in the middle of that campaign,” Cloherty explains. “I think they did $40k or $50k in influencers. And I don’t really know the number after that but they did some interna-tional territories and they did a big PR push in Germany. That song was really really big in Germany so they hired a bunch of German influencers.” The results were immediate: by the end of March 2020, “(I Hope You) Miss Me” was averaging over 100,000 streams per day on Spotify, a result that Cloherty says came without the help of official Spotify playlists, and had been used 22k times on TikTok. The song also landed in the Top 20 of Spotify’s Global Viral chart and, at time of writing, had passed 60m streams on Spotify. Songfluencer predicts “(I Hope You) Miss Me” will pass 95m total streams on Spotify and over 100,000 total audio uses on TikTok by Q3 2020.

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Joseph Black

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TikTok is the social platform that’s on everyone’s lips, having grown incredibly quickly in recent years and spawning viral hits like ‘Old Town Road’, ‘Lottery (Renegade)’ and ‘Say So’. This TikTok Best Practice module will look deeply into how artists and their teams can actually use the platform for their marketing efforts. It’s packed with ideas and skills: from natural-feeling marketing approaches, optimisation of your profile, to features like e-commerce – all with real-life case-studies.

We will start by looking at overall digital strategy and organic marketing techniques, from profile optimisation and posting strategy to features like live-streaming and e-commerce. We will also discuss how to collaborate with influencers to amplify campaigns and look at the opportunities within TikTok Ads. In our final section, we will present some real-life campaign examples which utilise different approaches including organic and paid campaigns, live and on-platform marketing partnerships.

For over a decade, Music Ally has upskilled people in all levels of the music industry: from major label teams, to Indies, managers, and DIY artists. Our Learning Hub is designed so that everyone – from students to CEOs – can get the edge they need. Always up-to-date with the newest digital marketing knowledge and future-facing strategies: Music Ally trains the best to be the best.

. .

Marlen has a background in music and brand partnerships, initially working for Universal Music in Germany and Switzerland. She has a Masters in Music Business Management in London, with expertise in integrated marketing campaigns and Intellectual Property and Copyright Management. Marlen works across Music Ally’s marketing services and delivers training to a wide range of clients including the MMF and BPI.

FOR MORE INFO AND TO ENROLL WITH 50% DISCOUNT, CLICK HERE..MusicAlly.lnk.to/tiktokbest

Exclusive 50% discount on this module for Sandbox readers!

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explains, giving the theoretical exam-ple of “vegan shoes”. Walton-Stoev, however, strikes a note of warning. “I love it [artists as influ-encers] but I hate that none of them know how to disclose their ads be-cause they’re getting paid hundreds of thousands for these collaborations and half the time they don’t even fucking put ‘ad’ in their caption anywhere, let alone anywhere it’s meant to be.”

Future thinkings the music industry’s pivot towards TikTok has shown, nothing lasts forever in social

media. Influencer marketing, then, is inevitably going to change, even if the fundamental concept of influential people promoting your product is eter-nal. At the same time, it seems hugely unlikely that the kind of short-form video that TikTok offers is going to slip out of fashion any time soon, even as TikTok itself starts allowing users to create videos of up to three minutes. The upshot of this, for Cloherty, is that other short-form video services, such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, are now muscling their way into the video market, becoming increasingly important for music business influenc-ers. “If, from all influencer marketing

[within the music industry], some 90% of the money goes to TikTok, I think it’s probably over time going to move more down to about 70%,” he says. He also predicts that the next evolu-tion of influencer marketing will see la-bels understand that using influencers is more about ongoing story building, rather than one-off promotions. “The industry is shying away from the fact that TikTok influencer campaign is synonymous with viral hit,” he says.

“All of last year, the words ‘TikTok influencer campaign’ was synonymous with ‘viral hit’ - like, ‘If I was gonna spend $5,000 on influencers will my song better go viral? Why didn’t it go viral?’ Now I think we’re actually getting it to a good expectation point,

where people are thinking, ‘How can I build consumption? How can I build mass? How can I build growth?’” Deal, meanwhile, predicts the growth of macro-influencers who tap into certain niches – and with that an explosion in the number of influencers. “Everyone has a sort of niche and an audience and there’s always going to be someone that wants to tap into that,” he says. “That gives big brands and also small brands the opportunity.” More influencers, however, probably equates to more regulation, which could represent a stick in the spokes of this booming industry. As mentioned above, both advertising authorities and platforms have been taking a harder line on influencer marketing, with the Advertising Standards Au-thority (ASA) in the UK even going so far as to name and shame a number of social media stars for flouting the rules of social media advertising. This might seem like a minor headache for an influencer marketing industry in full bloom. But – as any marketer will tell you – the one thing audiences don’t like is sponsored content that looks like advertising, which is pretty much exactly where the authorities think the industry should be heading.

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Josh Deal

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THE ‘INFLUENCER MARKETING’ ISSUE

CAMPAIGNS

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T H E L AT E S T P R OJ E C T S F R O M T H E D I G I TA L M A R K E T I N G A R E N A

nfluencer marketing in music often takes place around artists that are

putting out their earliest releases (to help raise their profile) or for acts needing a bit of a social media rocket under a comeback single or album.

There is now the “hype house” side trend, involving influencers working in the same environment as artists (as seen in this issue’s lead feature with Universal Music Sweden). Now UMG sister label Capitol is adding an A&R spin to its own house-based influencer marketing plan.

Seven participants – Alec Chambers, Caroline Carr, Attis, Diego Fragnaud, Tyler Brash, Olivia Boeyink and Klondike Blonde – will live in the same mansion in upstate New York for six weeks and much of their activity will be live-streamed around the clock.

There is a recording studio on the grounds and each week they will be set a different musical challenge, the first one being to write a song about a particular city or country picked at random. (Side note: the Bay City Rollers got their name by sticking a pin in a map of the US at random. If that’s not symbolic, we don’t know what is.)

It is effectively a songwriting bootcamp – and Capitol is partnering with Song House Live

House music: influencers live together and compete for Capitol Music record contract

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“It is effectively a songwriting bootcamp – and Capitol is partnering with Song House Live on it.

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CAMPAIGNS: SONG HOUSE LIVE

on it. In the press release announcing the project, the label said,

“Much as tech accelerators provide front-end support for fledgling inventors, CMG and Song House Live are providing unrivalled assistance to emerging artists from the initial creative concept onward – before a song becomes a viral hit.”

Music from the sessions will be released on a rolling basis and will be gathered together at the end in the Song House Live Season 1 compilation.

“Together with the Song House Live team, we’re able to meet fans where they consume music faster than ever by accelerating the traditional artist development process through this innovative concept,” is how Michelle Jubelirer, president and COO of Capitol Music Group, put it.

It is also a multi-platform undertaking with an official site hosting content as well as tie-in TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud presences. So there is a lot of content being produced

here and every eventuality is being covered off.

The footage may be used for what the producers are calling a “future episodic docuseries” – meaning that, if it all goes well, footage could be repackaged and repurposed (possibly on a TV channel) to give the winners an extra marketing push.

This is fundamentally a melding of Big Brother, X Factor, The Voice and Songland – and it will surely be as exhilarating and horrifying as that sounds.

“ “What about an influencer based on a logo? That’s impossible, right? Except that is precisely what electronic music label Monstercat is looking to get off the ground.”

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CAMPAIGNST H E L AT E S T P R OJ E C T S F R O M T H E D I G I TA L M A R K E T I N G A R E N A

veryone it seems is either working with or trying to become an

influencer these days. We could even call it “under the influencer” marketing.

These influencers are, for the most part, living humans, although there are sometimes animals (RIP Grumpy Cat) roped in. Or even cartoon figures (Krusty The Clown from The Simpsons was arguably the original influencer).

What about an influencer based on a logo? That’s impossible, right? Except that is precisely what elec-tronic music label Monstercat is looking to get off the ground.

As the label marks its 10th anni-versary it is doing the typical things one might expect – a retrospective, a celebratory compilation and so on. But it is also taking its own logo (a cat wearing headphones and having a dance) and turning that into a 3D “influencer”.

Influenc3D: Monstercat’s influencer strategy in three dimensions

2

E

THE ‘INFLUENCER MARKETING’ ISSUE

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CAMPAIGNS: MONSTERCAT

But HOW can a logo be turned into an influencer? That’s a perfectly valid question.

The long-term plan is that the 3D cat logo is something that can be dropped into a wide range of content and media platforms as the label markets itself and its acts. It will make cameos in live settings, gaming, streams, social posts and more.

It was inspired by the slow emergence of “virtual influencers”, but did not want to replicate exactly what they do.

“I’m not interested in that!” Monstercat founder and CEO Mike Darlington told us recently. “But the technology behind this can be used for social content, brand partnerships, in video games, film, televi-sion… You’re not having to build original content each time: once you have this built and rigged, you can provide them with models to build off of.”

He added, “I could be in my home, and moving my face and looking at my phone seeing the character move. Or you could drop it on my desk using AR. There’s so many possibilities.”

It could perhaps be understood as a meta-influencer in 3D logo form. Plus it offers a continuity point across all of the different marketing activities it is undertaking.

This could be a very wise move and might prove cheaper in the long run

after the anima-tion costs are covered. There are also none of the risks associated with real-world influencer part-nerships – such as them not neces-sarily posting the content the brand wants or possibly getting embroiled

in a scandal due to certain behaviours or comments that land everyone in hot water.

Removing the risk factor from the influ-encer world is now a possibility.

Maybe using a 3D “influencer” means the reach and impact will not be as broad or as deep as it would be with a human influencer; but the one shining benefit is that it is unlikely to say anything that will put the brand at the sharp end of a lawsuit or get it cancelled.

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OUR SERVICES

About SandboxClients include: Spotify, Red Bull, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, Beggars Group, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Domino Recording Co, AEI, Anjuna, Songtrust, Blue Raincoat Music, Chrysalis Records, The Orchard, the MMF, the BPI, Berklee College of Music, BIMM, RARE Sound, Tommy Boy Records, Hollywood Records and more.

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